DocFest review: ‘Barge’

Ben Powell’s film looks at the river barge system transporting coal, gravel, corn and other commodities and materials around the ports of the Mississippi River. This vital part of American transport infrastructure is pretty unique work and the setting lends itself well to the screen. Powell’s observational documentary has a mostly languid pace — like an at-work barge, in fact.

The landscape can be beautiful and there’s a lot of working by yourself on board. There’s regimen and regularity: The crew cook dishes out fish every Friday, BBQ’d rib-eye steaks on Saturdays, and chicken on Sundays.

But this isn’t a Carnival cruise and it’s not for everyone. The work is dangerous and taxing – crew members are required to be away from home for four weeks at a time, working round the clock shifts of six hours on and six hours off.

The long, wide rectangular barges are massive — weighing thousands of tons – and are lashed together with huge steel cables and cleats. Deckhands hand crank ratcheted couplings together, they break them apart by swinging sledgehammers, heavy cables are hauled all over the deck. This is maritime construction work, wrangling huge floating buildings in and out of tight spaces with precision. A float-away barge can be a disaster.

The men of the crew come from different backgrounds and have different reasons for joining up, and director Powell gets the workers to open up enough to reveal motivations, hopes and dreams. There’s a new deckhand who comes from a family line of barge workers. There’s “D-Lo”, a deckhand who’s served time and now relishes his second chance to do honest labor and earn a good paycheck. There’s another crew member – Colin — who’s struggling with the work and the life. He’s bored and seems ill-suited for the job. The friction between Colin and his barge mates – and the seasoned captain who no longer wants him – is the closest things we have to a plot here.

But that’s fine. The expansive horizontal landscapes and the barges themselves are wide-screen friendly, and the mechanics of the barge system are very interesting. Seeing even more of the barge transportation process from start to finish would be fascinating — but it would take a glacially long time. Barges are slow, and working them is deliberate.

This observational documentary is part industrial process film and part social realism record, and I could see this crew, these boats and this industry serving as proper subjects for a WPA mural.

[Aside: This is the second barge-related film I’ve seen recently: The other was a narrative movie that played the San Francisco Silent Film Festival: The Swallow and The Titmouse (André Antoine, 1920) situates its story in the Danish and French barge canal system of that era. That film’s rushes were deemed to be too realistic by the producers who believed audiences wanted less realism and more escapism, but today that fantastic footage serves as a gorgeous realism document of barge life from nearly a century ago.]